Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.

Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.